Steamed Demos 6 (teddyras)
4Weird mix of stuff in here; across genres and game quality, these ended up all over the place. 1st game plays like chibi robo to a degree. Seen a few games like this recently, the chibi-robo likes, just small fellas runnin around normal sized worlds. It's pretty decent, but like traditional japanese style homes always feel limiting in games if that's the only level. Across games it always feels like these types of levels lack furniture and everything is stored in closets, so a lot of rooms feel kinda empty, and the furniture that's there might just be low tables and futons, so like dang. When your character is small, this makes it even emptier. Still this game was fine for a demo, just hope there's some variety in the full game.
Real web legends brought me a good bit of joy. It plays like devil may cry surprisingly. The cutscenes seem pretty neat, the story seems cute; I'm hyped for when this one comes out. Game overall was just cute and seems like it'll be fun to play. The big danger with these kinds of games though is when they come out, they might just be really short. Like the thing could come out and be double the demo length and then that's the whole game, that'll be 19.99, game lasts exactly 2 hours and 1 minute long. Other times this doesnt happen and you get a nice little 4-8 hour game that's satisfying and fun that you get to tell everyone about.
Lacerator seems like it'll be fine, has a goofy premise with the man who love sex and wears his sex t-shirt. Just not sure how much more game will be there beyond the demo: these games tend to not be that long that they need a demo and the ones that go too far beyond 2 hours tend to overstay their welcome. I barely remember anything about Hope Is Gone 2 months later, so it didn't leave much impact. I remember it feeling like I just played a whole indie game from itchio, so I don't think I'm gonna pick up the full version, whatever I played was good enough for me.
Enjineer touted itself as a game made by actual engineers and you can tell, because it's pretty dry. I remember adding this to my wishlist ages ago after seeing posts about it somewhere with an interesting premise: build a thing, then use like QWOP kinda controls to try to get across it. The demo though ended up just being mostly building challenges and movement challenges separately, which makes it boring. It didn't escalate its challenges enough and felt kinda like the creators think the user needs to be babied, or that they were just overthinking it and making too many smaller challenges. It should have been more sandboxy and solving problems that are mostly traversal based like get from point A to B, here's your building materials. Instead it's like, build a fence, build a water tower, do an obstacle course. Just too many small boring challenges, nothing like I expected from what I saw before playing the game.
Original Air Date: October 2023
0:00 Ichima-san
34:53 Real Web Legends
1:13:00 The Lacerator
1:30:08 Hope Is Gone
2:00:14 The Enjineer